Fidelity Investments enjoys a well-earned reputation for technological leadership in financial services, and its Fidelity Center for Advanced Technology (FCAT) aims to keep it that way. Past FCAT projects have led to the company's early adoption of the web, mobile trading, and iPhone and Apple Watch apps. More recently, FCAT has been blazing a trail in another new direction—virtual reality (VR). One case in point: Cora, an avatar who hosts multi-user conversations in a "virtual chart room,” all built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

‘‘Using Amazon Sumerian, we can get to market on many browsers, VR headsets, and mobile phones much faster than before.’’

– Adam Schouela, Head of Emerging Technology, FCAT

About Fidelity Investments

Benefits of AWS

AWS Services Used

About Fidelity Investments

Fidelity Investments, the first mutual fund company to launch a website, administers $7.4 trillion in assets and serves a diverse set of customers, including 30 million who invest with Fidelity. With 40,000+ employees, the company is based in Boston.

Virtual Reality—for FinServ?

"We saw potential for a virtual-reality platform that could support financial conversations among family members and trusted advisors, even if they were in different locations,” says Adam Schouela, head of FCAT’s Emerging Technology group. “We realized that—by using voice control and data visualization and putting everyone in the same virtual room—we could facilitate a really robust conversation where participants would be able to simply turn to each other and ask questions.”

Building platform-specific VR solutions takes considerable time and money, so FCAT was excited when AWS invited the team to join prerelease testing of Amazon Sumerian, a service that makes it simple to create platform-agnostic VR applications with lifelike characters in immersive environments.

The Amazon Sumerian–based Cora—which relies on Amazon Lex for language understanding and Amazon Polly for lifelike text-to-voice—can answer questions verbally or display lists, graphs, and charts to help users find a wider range of financial data and act on it much more quickly than is possible now.

Getting to Market Faster with Amazon Sumerian

"It takes less time and money to develop once on Amazon Sumerian and deploy across platforms than to develop separately for multiple platforms," says Schouela. "Using Amazon Sumerian, we can get to market on many browsers, VR headsets, and mobile phones much faster than before.

“This experiment with Amazon Sumerian is an example of how we continue to experiment with new technologies to find out what might be possible when applied in new ways,” says Schouela. “FCAT’s mission is to help Fidelity harness emerging technology—not tech for tech’s sake, but to really benefit the business and our customers.”